My first "fuck off, what the fuck, go AWAY!" moment with Win7

[theweaselking]

So, so far I'm *very* happy with Win7. It's significantly faster than WinXP on the same hardware, I've had significantly fewer problems with drivers and hardware recognition than I'd *ever* had with XP or Vista.

My main complaint was the inability to get to a non-graphical login - I couldn't do the old CTRL-ALT-DELx2 trick to lose the "account selection" screen and type in the username I wanted, if I decided I wanted to be Administrator instead of myself. Worse, I couldn't get rid of the very pretty but entirely pointless graphical login itself. As far as I know, it's impossible - but at least I killed the "effects" and the background image.

I also had a seriously annoying internet-access problem for a while, but that wasn't Win7. That was my ISP, sucking ass, and the reason I hadn't seen it before, and wasn't seeing it currently on my lapdog or on The Lovely Wife's machine was that the problem is a *DNS* problem and all those other machines are preconfigured to *avoid the ISP's DNS*. So that was an easy fix, once I remembered to do it.

But I hit a VERY annoying problem.

In Firefox, and only Firefox, sometimes my keyboard layout would change. I'd be suddenly typing in *french*. It wasn't affecting anything else. Closing and reopening Firefox fixed it. And I immediately looked in the language and location settings, saw nothing about other languages, and was very confused. I figured it might be some weird-assed thing Firefox would fix in a day or two.

And then it happened in Pidgin, and I had an epiphany.
I looked in the *accessibility* settings, with regards to language, and, lo and behold, because I'm Canadian, Win7 helpfully installed French layout keyboards in case I might want them, and then helpfully bound CTRL-SHIFT to be the keyboard shortcut to swap keyboard input modes without needing to open the language tools.

CTRL-SHIFT.

Also known as *what you press when you want to select text using whole words at a time*. Standard, and has been for *decades*, across multiple platforms.

Holy FUCK that's the stupidest key binding choice since Facebook bound ALT-F4 to "swap directly to my Wall".

So, I told it DO NOT CHANGE MY LANGUAGE ON ME EVER, and, for good measure, I removed the French keyboard mappings it had so helpfully installed on me because as a Canadian I might want a a fucking e-accent-grave.

And that's my biggest complaint about Win7 so far. I am not only happy with this OS, I have had to make many fewer changes than I ever needed to in XP. What I want now is the ability to reduce the spacing between icons in the systray and on the desktop. I've reduced font size and swapped to small icons, but they're still wasting a ton of dead space between them. It's like using a Mac. Dammit, wasted screen real estate is *wasted*, let me put 'em closer together, fucker.

EDIT!: lafnjack points out how to fix the incompetent useless Mac-style crazy-large icon distance. And it works, perfectly, for your Desktop. Fix systray and win a prize! The prize is the hammer, for the record. But y'know.

Comments

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Your commentary and your profanity amuse me. And make me want to hop to W7.

[plantyhamchuk.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I'm a throwback/Mac user, but my husband is a diehard PC user and very interested in switching over to this new windows7 contraption thingy.

OP - does it work well with Opera?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I have no idea. I don't use browsers that aren't Firefox[1], since nothing but Firefox runs Adblock Plus the way I want it.

[1]: And sometimes IE, for testing and the very rare ActiveX site.

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Chrome and Safari make nice gmail clients and CSS-testing platforms (although the former may be of reduced utility if gmail isn't your AIM client, like it is mine).


But seriously, for me, without ABP (and sometimes NoScript), the internet is broken.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

My update was tax-deductible and part of my business is being able to answer questions about things like Windows. As such, when my gaming destop died, I figured I might as well upgrade.

And *wow*.

So, is it worth the $250 post-tax pricetag? Not unless you're using Vista, or running SERIOUSLY overpowered hardware (like I was) on XP *and* want to reinstall your OS (like I did, since I'd gefucked it) since you can't just "upgrade" directly from XP.

If you're running Home and don't want the Domain-joining and XP VM Created For You On The Same License things, the $130 price tag for Win7 Home is much more palatable.

But yeah.

I would not hesitate to purchase a new computer with Win7.
If I had a free upgrade from Vista, I would do so, immediately.
Changing from XP is worth it *only* if you were going to do so anyway, but the next time you need to reinstall XP, you should strongly consider upgrading. Of course, this is me 3 days in, so waiting a week and asking me again then might also be a good idea.

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

As a student at an American university, I can get Professional for $30. How about at that price?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Vista: FUCK YES SWAP NOW.
XP: Get the license now, before you lose access. Swap the next time you reinstall the OS.

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

What're your thoughts on these sorts of things (http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/2227/get-the-classic-start-menu-in-windows-7/)?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

In theory, a good idea. If I hit the Start Menu, that means I *must want* the Programs menu, by definition, since there's nothing there that I can't hit, faster, using something else.

Which means that the Win7 default of "anything other than the Programs menu" is crap.

But I fail to trust Random Internet Software, regardless.

[kierthos.livejournal.com]

I must be weird (well, duh), but I've had only one minor problem with Vista ever. XP, on the other hand, decided it wanted to eat my entire goddamned hard drive once.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I've seen XP wipe the partition table on the system drive quite a few times over the last eight years, and I've never had any issues with Vista (and I've been running it since release).

I've been running the Win7 RC since it was made available, and I'm pretty much with John on a lot of this stuff, except his Vista hatred. Vista needs some tuning out of the box since some of the default assumptions are silly, but my gaming rig (that I'm typing this very message on) multiboots XP, Vista Ultimate 64bit, and Win7 Ultimate RC 64bit, with Vista64 being the default. My resource usage under Vista is only slightly above Win7, but I expect that since a large part of what was done for 7 was code clean up and optimization. Performance wise, if there's a difference, it's not enough to stand out.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

One caveat; if you've got old hardware, I wouldn't recommend switching. I did the compatability test on my UMPC and it gave me a laundry list of cautions and errors... most alarmingly that my Bluetooth client might not be compatible, which'd risk making my wireless keyboard useless. Also, the touchscreen wouldn't be fully compatible as Samsung still hasn't made an HID driver for it, so I don't know how well the handwriting recognition would work out.

-- Steve also doubts he'd be happy driving Win7 with a 900MHz Celeron.

PS: Next portable I get will run Win7, though. I'm keeping my eye on Viliv, maybe for next fall.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Of course, this is me 3 days in, so waiting a week and asking me again then might also be a good idea.

I bought a new laptop in July-ish, and put a Windows 7 RC build on it when I got it since that's what all the cool kids were doing. Having also jumped from XP on my old notebook, I've been impressed at how well Windows 7 doesn't piss me the fuck off, especially compared to the week or so I used Vista a year or so ago.

[dominitus.livejournal.com]

I've only been using it for a day and am loving the hell out of it. It's fixed so many other niggling issues I've had with Vista, is blazingly quick, and seems to be more accessible when you want to go and make changes. Very happy so far.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

XP doesn't *guess* at what languages I might want, and then swap with a predefined keyboard combo.

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

The Light Is Shed moment: So that is why I would randomly switch to Turkish on my laptop when I was using SIWave--- ALT+SHIFT+mouse is how you zoom in/out in that program (it's used to draw and simulate circuit boards.)

BRB, off to unbind that.

In the meantime, the "Go away hate hate hate!" moment for me with Win7 came 10 minutes after I installed it, because it would not do the one thing we bought the computer to do. Very extreme case, I'm aware. We wanted a new computer to control a measurement device we have in the lab, with its own control software; they wouldn't sell anything but computers with 7 on it so we had to get one. Then we found out that it would not control our $20000 measurement device because the USB drivers weren't digitally signed and there was no option to say "install it anyway, I don't care."

Some Googling later, there is a way to turn off that nanny behaviour, but only if you consent to running Win7 in "test" mode. Which makes, probably among other things, Firefox switch automatically to Safe Mode and stay there. So far I didn't find another workaround. Thankfully, I don't care much---I really need that computer only as a front end to data acquisition.

Other than that, what I saw was nice.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"wouldn't sell"?

What the hell kind of mickey mouse supplier is that? And *when* - Win7's only been out for, like, 5 days.

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

Best Buy.

(Don't judge us, OK? We really needed a computer right then, and I could not convince my boss to just get parts and build it myself.)

It gets funnier: We originally went to buy a computer on the 21st, one day before the official release. Whereupon they would not sell us any of the computers in store, except two truly trashy e-machines running XP, because they had "sent back all the computers with Vista and we are not allowed to sell Windows 7 until tomorrow." So we had to go back early Thursday morning.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Ah, so you went retail, this wasn't a proper supplier despite being for a university[1].

And there's nothing wrong with Best Buy inherently - I just wouldn't trust their "service" guys to fix anything more complicated that a "not plugged in" error.

[1]: I think that's right? Business, then, if wrong. Still, there's supposed to a Process and a Supplier, to make sure you don't get saddled with grandma's first speak-and-spell.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Screened by request!

But yeah. If you were local, I'd know a couple of shops where you could call them and they'd get you anything you wanted, pretty much on the spot. You're not local - but you should be able to find such a computer store near you. Seriously, it's well worth it to start cultivating a relationship with a shop like that at this stage - having a bunch of guys who know what you've got, know what you need, and have a vested interest in keeping you happy to come back to them the next time you need a machine, is great.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Icon spacing uses that same window that's been kicking around since Windows 95 (maybe earlier), but it's well-hidden now. Go to Control Panels -> Personalization -> Window Color (at the bottom) -> Advanced Appearance Settings..., and then select horizontal or vertical icon spacing in the Item dropdown menu.

Also, I'm a big non-fan of websites that use keyboard commands. For instance (you'd think Google would have thought of this) Blogger's post editor maps control-L to add blockquote tags, when that's what every browser I know of uses for the location field.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Holy crap, that's EXACTLY what I wanted for the desktop. Doesn't fix Systray, though.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's why I didn't mention the tray. ;) I only ever have three icons visible, though, so I never looked into it. I could see how the tray spacing would be a problem if you needed a bunch of icons down there.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Oh, and one utility that Windows 7 broke that an alternative only recently popped up for is middle clicking taskbar icons to close them. There was an Auto Hotkey script that had a kludgy solution to this, but 7 Taskbar Tweaker does it much better - and adds a couple other features that registry hacks couldn't quite get around, like the thumbnail previews when you hover over a taskbar button.

[jerril]

"the thumbnail previews when you hover over a taskbar button."

OH GOD I HATE THAT THING HAAAATE

Thank you!

(That's actually a pretty trivial complaint for my first 3 months or so with the RC, so no complaints here, but I HATE IT SOOOO MUUUCH ARG)

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I can't stand any of the preview things. If I could get them out of the alt-tab dialog without making it look like a throwback to Windows 95 (along with that stupid Desktop icon) they'd be gone from there, too.

[sivi-volk.livejournal.com]

Huh. Not using W7, but that would explain why I randomly get a French keyboard now and again.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Using Vista?

[sivi-volk.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I was happy until the last updates - then Flash stopped working on all browsers.

I had to find an app to force uninstall Flash and then do a clean install.

Now all seems to be well again. Apart from that Win7 does seem to do what you expect it to.

[jerril]

Odd, I haven't noticed something like that in the RC. But then, Flash is the devil, and I'd probably be greatful for it being erradicated from the world :D

Québécois don't Ctrl-Shift

[senorcameltoe.livejournal.com]

The Ctrl-Shift thing makes perfect sense... First of all, if they hadn't enabled that think of all the bitching we would have to endure because the Québécois had been forgotten (again). Second, The Québécois don't use Ctrl-Shift to select whole words at a time - they do it character by character because it gives them something else to complain about.

[faeriemuriel.livejournal.com]

Oh, you can just type in French stuff?

My computer bit the dust, and I never want to mess with settings on other peoples' computers because I won't know how to change them back, so I long-since learned the alt keys by heart. (Is a failure at a French minor.)

My two cents!

[peterchayward.livejournal.com]

I use ctrl+shift to switch between QWERTY and Dvorak, and I've found it really intuitive. The combination only works if you press them then release them without pressing anything else - if you're using an arrow key to select words, it doesn't acknowledge it.

[miami-pony.livejournal.com]

Jesus Expletive Christ, I had the EXACT same thing happen to me. SO annoying. I believe I may have been as annoyed with it as you were. :)